Everything since then just adds more whitespace
I always felt that UX people are self-loathing, and thus, view their best work as... nothingness!
The more of nothing they add, the more space, the more emptiness, the more comfortable they are with their work!
The less of them, the better they did!
"Hi, I took this perfect thing, and added ... nothingness, and got paid for it!"
Perhaps, a little voice in my head whispers, the nothingness matches their soul!
IRC was always a pretty big part of my life, it's where I got into organized quake/cs1.6/Dota matches. I'm not as involved in hardcore gaming now, but I suspect that's all been replaced by discord and automated match-making in games.
I was also a great resource for learning about technical topics. Nowadays most open source communities point to discord/slack/gitter or something like that.
I really wish IRC would make a comeback. All these new networks force you to use their client to connect, and I hate the modern design trends. mIRC (on windows) and irssi(on Linux) got the UX/UI pretty much perfect in my book. Everything since then just adds more whitespace and distractions from the actual important content (the chat).